PopDigests

More and more people are living until the ages of 100 or 105, becoming so-called centenarians or semi-supercentenarians. Women are far more likely than men to reach this old age, but according to a new study by Graziella Caselli, Marco Battaglini and Giorgia Capacci, the age gap is likely to grow smaller in the following decades.

Childless men and women have an overall higher mortality than adults with children, meaning that they die earlier, recent studies show. Mothers and fathers with two biological children have the lowest mortality risks, but it increases for parents with three or more biological children. What are the explanations for the relationship between having children and mortality risks?

In a recent paper, researchers Zachary Van Winkle and Emanuela Struffolino addressed the issue of in-work poverty – an alarming phenomenon which is exceptionally common in the United States. They considered life courses of individuals from age 18-50 who were born between 1957 and 1964 in the United States, and particularly focused on the association between family demographic processes and the probability of belonging to the working with low-income.

Often fertility rates are analysed at the country level. However, it is also often disregarded that there are economic, political and cultural regional differences within a country, which have a considerable influence on the respective opportunity structure of women and families. In a recent article, Martin Bujard and Melanie Scheller examine cohort fertility rates for all German districts. They provide a broad overview of factors influencing birth behaviours at a local level and to what extent these factors can explain regional differences.

When speaking about attitudes towards immigration, one argument is often used: Individuals who compete with immigrants in the labour market are said to be more against immigration than individuals who do not. Empirical support for this argument is widely debated, but still it remains.

A recent study by Kelly Huegaerts, Bram Spruyt and Christophe Vanroelen investigates the association between forms of capital and mental health among unemployed youth, with a specific focus on the mediating role of feelings of deprivation and self-esteem as "mechanisms of embodiment".

Does health selection or social causation dominate in Europe? Health differences which correspond to socioeconomic status (SES) can be attributed to three causal mechanisms: SES affects health (social causation), health affects SES (health selection), and common background factors influence both SES and health (indirect selection).

Can social media channels like Facebook be used to analyse fertility data? According to recent research, it can be. In a paper by Francesco Rampazzo, Emilio Zagheni, Ingmar Weber, Maria Rita Testa and Francesco Billari, they sought out to determine if anonymous and aggregate data from Facebook advertising can be a viable source for fertility data. This is particularly relevant when looking at developing countries, where official data is less available.

Decades of social science research provide plenty of evidence on ethnic and racial discrimination in various areas of society based on ethnographic work and analysis of traditional data sources. Online markets offer a new perspective to study the diverse settings in which ethnic discrimination can occur and provide new channels to test assumptions about why and how members of ethnic or racial groups are being discriminated against.

Inequalities in health are not only caused by biological determinants, but also by social determinants like income or education. One’s own socio-economic position has been shown to often be an important predictor for health and mortality. A recently published article by Jenny Torssander, Heta Moustgaard, Riina Peltonen, Fanny Kilpi and Pekka Martikainen sheds further light on the assumption that not only someone’s own resources affect health and mortality, but the resources of the partner one lives with also play a role.